Politico: “Lin Wood played a starring role in Georgia’s GOP civil war after the 2020 elections. Now the pro-Trump lawyer is taking his roadshow to South Carolina, where he’s campaigning as a ‘chaos’ candidate to lead the state Republican Party. Wood, who transformed from a top Atlanta trial lawyer to a leading election conspiracy theorist in November, moved to South Carolina in February. Then the firebrand lawyer shocked the political establishment in one of the GOP’s most important state parties by mounting an unexpectedly strong challenge to the incumbent chairman, Drew McKissick. The outcome has out-sized implications because of South Carolina’s role in GOP presidential primaries – the state hosts the first primary in the South, and almost always votes for the eventual Republican nominee. It’s emblematic of broader divisions between longtime GOP members and those brought into the Republican fold by Donald Trump, who remains the party’s center of gravity.”
“Trump has already endorsed McKissick, who went so far as to cancel the 2020 presidential primary in the state when the president ran for reelection. But in Wood’s telling, it was he who carried the true Trump mantle by fighting to overturn election results in Georgia while McKissick did too little to add his voice to the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement. An adherent of the QAnon conspiracy theory, Wood contends Trump won the election in a landslide and is still president. Speaking without notes in a style that blends the skills of a preacher and an accomplished trial lawyer, Wood – who first gained fame as the attorney for the family of JonBenét Ramsey and also for Richard Jewell, who was wrongly accused of the Atlanta Olympics bombing – has built a candidacy around his support of Trump, whom Wood said he supported in 2016 because he thought chaos was good for the country. ‘We need some chaos in the Republican Party in South Carolina. Somebody needs to shake it up,’ Wood said Tuesday in the city of Aiken to applause and laughter. ‘So here I am, Mr. Shaker.'”